Botswana Luxury Safaris

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa,” Isak Dinesen wrote, “you find it is the same in all her music.” That sublime continental symphony reaches one of its stunning climaxes in the dreamland of the Okavango Delta, where the Okavango River, the fourth-longest river in Africa, fails to find an outlet to the sea, and instead settles with a liquid sigh into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. As the great photographer Frans Lanting wrote in Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden, “the [Delta’s] very existence in the middle of the Kalahari is nothing short of miraculous…like a dream.”

A particularly sweet dream, is the Okavango: well populated by marvelous animals big and small, punctuated by isolated idyllic lagoons (ideal location for our favoured lodges), overarched by vast African skies (“Night silence in Africa always holds the far sea-sound of urgent stars” Laurens van der Post wrote in The Lost World of the Kalahari). We round out many Botswana safaris with visits to Chobe National Park, redolent with Kalahari mystique, and the Moremi Game Reserve, a great place, as Isak Dinesen wrote, to sit by a campfire, “listening to the lions far out in the darkness…like returning to the really true world again–where I probably once lived 10,000 years ago.”